Paula Cohen doesn’t like to think about some of the things she’s seen middle schoolers eat for breakfast: hot Cheetos, a bag of Pringles.

But if locally grown fruits and vegetables can one day become staples in the cafeteria, maybe the sixth-grade teacher at Orville Wright Middle School will have the satisfaction of seeing her students’ habits change.

At least that’s one of the goals of an initiative under way on the Westchester campus that would convert about an acre of mostly unused green space into a community garden, organizers say.

The plan would allow for the school and its residential neighbors to share the use of the site at Emerson Avenue and 80th Place. It would provide enough room for a student-tended garden and plots that could be leased to the public, along with fruit trees, a “walking spiral” and an outdoor amphitheater learning area.

Cohen, who is spearheading planning efforts at the school, said one of her hopes is that the garden will teach teenagers where their food comes from.

“If they’re involved in the growing of it,” she figures, “they’re going to eat it.”

The project has become a passion for Cohen, who is in her third year at the Los Angeles Unified school.

But she’s had her own learning curve – she teaches language arts and social studies, not horticulture – and Cohen herself was not a gardener.

So that’s where the Westchester-based group Environmental Change-Makers comes in.

Gardening is a speciality for the organization, which in early 2008 tore out a side lawn at Westchester’s Holy Nativity Church to plant a community garden where fresh food is grown and donated to the poor.

Cohen met Joanne Poyourow, who co-founded the Change-Makers with Holy Nativity’s the Rev. Peter Rood, at a workshop on community gardens in the summer of 2009.

Since then, the group has helped her design a student garden that started taking shape over the summer, and to plan for the larger project in the same area.

They are working with a collection of community leaders on establishing an agreement with the school district that would allow for the shared use of the property.

Chris Espinosa, director of capital projects in the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office, said the goal is for a community garden club to oversee the site.

Espinosa, who has worked on similar “joint-use” projects throughout the city, said the initial idea was to construct a park on the school property with community beautification grant money obtained by the Westchester-Playa Education Foundation.

That plan was eventually changed to accommodate a public garden, he said, but the grant money still will help fund the project, along with other donations, including compost material from the nearby Vons store and mulch from the city Bureau of Sanitation.

Students would be able to access to the area during the school day and the public after hours, Poyourow said. She envisions 40 plots that would be tended by residents and overseen by the garden club.

Both Cohen and Poyourow believe the initiative will not only produce fresh produce, but help the school forge ties with Westchester residents who feel disconnected from it. In addition to housing a community school and a math, science and aerospace magnet, the Orville Wright campus also is home to a kindergarten through eighth-grade charter school.

Many families living on streets surrounding the 80th Street campus choose not to send their children there, both women said.

“This is sort of my personal goal to get it going because we have a community that sort of perceives our students in not a great light. And we have great students,” Cohen said. “It’s a difficult age. My personal goal is to forge that bridge between the students and the community.”

For Poyourow, it’s heartening to see others taking an interest locally in growing food. The space at Orville Wright some time ago housed a working garden, she said.

“We’re going to be installing most of this garden with volunteer labor during a series of community service work days. A lot of this is getting done with donated things, in-kind materials,” she said. “It’s great to see more people interested in growing food.”